July 11, 1979

Arthur Fiedler, 84, Conductor Of Boston Pops 50 Years, Dies

By ALLEN HUGHES

Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra for 50 years and one of the world's best-
known musical figures, died yesterday morning at his home in Brookline Mass. He was 84 years
old.

The Pops, under Harry Ellis Dickson, its assistant conductor for 25 years, noted Mr. Fiedler's
death last night by beginning its concert in Boston's Symphony Hall with his signature piece,
John Phillip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," played pianissimo. After the first few bars, Mr.
Dickson walked away from the podium, leaving the orchestra to play on leaderless.

In the audience, standing throughout the piece, a few persons were seen wiping tears away. At
the point in the song when the American flag is unfurled on stage, numerous persons broke into
tears, but the audience was mostly solemn. At the end of the march, the audience broke into
immediate and spontaneous applause for about half a minute, followed by half a minute of
silence. They sat down and the regular program resumed.

For more than half a century, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra were joined in a
musical union that, through concerts, recordings, radio broadcasts and television programs,
brought untold musical pleasure to millions of Americans.

400,000 at Bicentennial Concert

If one event could be said to sum up the grandfatherly, white-haired conductor's extraordinary
popular appeal, it may have been the Bicentennial concert that he led on the Fourth of July in
1976, on Boston's Esplanade. An estimated 400,000 cheering Fiedler admirers crammed
themselves into the outdoor area for a free program of patriotic tunes, in what was probably the
largest gathering for a musical event in the nation's history.

Mr. Fiedler, who projected a jolly, unsnobbish image, had his finger on the pulse of Mr. and Mrs.
Middle America. He seemed always to know exactly how much easy-to-listen-to classical music
they could and would take when it was mixed with generous portions of show tunes and other
popular music done in lush symphonic arrangements.

Each spring at the end of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's regular season, its staid Symphony
Hall was given a cafelike aspect, and Mr. Fiedler filer it with tuneful music that was nearly
always upbeat and often frothy.

Because the Boston Pops on its home ground--though not always on tour--was the Boston
Symphony minus its major principal players, Mr. Fiedler had first-rate musicians to work with,
and for the most part, they seemed to enjoy working with him.

The Boston Pops tradition was already 45 years old when he took over the podium in 1930, but
the stamp he put on it was so strong that it has been difficult to think Boston Pops without
thinking Fiedler.

His recordings with the Pops for RCA and Polydor are estimated to have sold 50 millions disks,
and his recent tours outsold those of the regular Boston Symphony.

Despite his identification for nearly half a century with light music, Mr. Fiedler was neither
exclusively nor originally attached to it.

He studied violin--"It was just a chore," he said--as a child and joined the Boston Symphony as a
violinist when he was 20 years old. He switched to the viola because, as he explained in later
years, he found it more interesting. He was a regular Symphony player until he took over the
Pops. Meanwhile, however, he had organized the Arthur Fiedler Sinfonietta, in 1924, and with it
had demonstrated his conducting ability.

For decades, he appeared as guest conductor of orchestras all over the country, and when they
would let him do so, which was not often, he planned standard symphonic programs for these
engagements.

'Something Is Driving Me'

His life was a whirlwind of activity, which he explained in 1972 in a New York Times interview
with Stephen Rubin by saying, "Something is driving me. . . . I just can't sit and twiddle my
thumbs."

Mr. Fiedler's activity, success and natural penchant for showmanship and publicity did not
endear him to most of the other conductors of the Boston Symphony. And, except for Charles
Munch, he had little favorable to say about them. Serge Koussevitzky, music director from 1924
to 1949, was Mr. Fiedler's particular bete noire.

He was aware that many critics and members of the classical-music public shared the other
conductors' disdain for what he was doing. He called them "culture vultures" and "snobs," and
returned their contempt.

Mr. Fiedler was born to Emanuel and Johanna Fiedler in the Back Bay section of Boston on Dec.
17, 1894. The Fiedler family had been musical for generations, and his father, who was born in
Poland, had been taken to Boston by Wilhelm Gericke in 1885 to play in the first-violin section
of the Boston Symphony.

Young Arthur attended the Prince and Latin Schools until 1910, when his father moved the
family first to Vienna and then to Berlin. From 1911 to 1915, Arthur studied at the Royal
Academy of Music, where his violin teacher was Willy Hess, who had been a concertmaster of
the Boston Symphony. The young man also studied piano and conducting, and made his podium
debut at the age of 17 conducting three of Mozart's German Dances and Mendelssohn's Piano
Concerto in G minor.

By the time he was 20 he had returned to Boston and became a member of the second-violin
section of the Symphony. During his tenure as an orchestra member, he occasionally switched
from violin or viola to play celesta, piano or organ. When the conductorship of the Pops was
open in 1924, Mr. Fiedler applied for the job but was turned down. It was then that he organized
the Fiedler Sinfonietta, composed of Symphony players, and began to prove he had conducting
talents.

In 1929, he organized the outdoor Esplanade Concerts in Boston, and when the Pops job opened
up again in 1930 he was offered it.

Apart from music, Mr. Fiedler was known best as an avid amateur fireman, and in 1970 he noted
that he had been made an honorary fireman in 270 cities: "I've never left a concert to go to a fire,
but I have left fires to go to a concert." On his 75th birthday, his family bought him a 1938
pumper from the Marlboro, N.H., Fire Department.

Mr. Fiedler collapsed at his desk at 7 A.M. while going over musical scores and was found
shortly afterward by his wife, Ellen, according to Peter Gelb, a spokesman for the orchestra. Mr.
Gelb quoted Mr. Fiedler's physician, Dr. Samuel Proger, as saying that the conductor had died
apparently of a cardiac arrest.

Mr. Fiedler was hospitalized last winter for treatment of a brain disorder that had left him
paralyzed and unable to speak, but he recovered and went on to lead the orchestra in a
triumphant 50th anniversary concert in May. A few days later, he collapsed after a concert and
was hospitalized with what was diagnosed as a mild heart attack, his fifth. Mr. Fiedler had been
recovering at home and was preparing to lead the orchestra again when he was fatally stricken.

Officials of the Pops had been considering candidates to replace Mr. Fiedler for several years,
but no formal search had been conducted. Yesterday, the officials said that they had no
immediate plans to replace Mr. Fiedler and that Mr. Dickson would take charge until a choice
was made.

After having what he described as "a very charming bachelorhood for about 50 years," Mr.
Fiedler married Ellen Bottomley, a Boston socialite, in 1942. They had three children, Johanna,
Deborah and Peter. Johanna Fiedler is a member of the Metropolitan Opera's press department.

A private funeral, for members of the family, will be held tomorrow. On Sunday, there will be a
memorial at the Hatch Shell on the banks of the Charles, a copy of the Bicentennial concert,
organized by David Mugar, a Boston businessman and Pops benefactor, and the Boston
Symphony.

Exponent of Populist Music

By JOHN ROCKWELL

The easiest and perhaps best way to appreciate Arthur Fiedler's accomplishment is to take him on
exactly the terms he wished himself to be taken--as a genial, extroverted and vigorous exponent
of populism in the realm of classical music. His programming format was simple and invariable-
-a few light-classical staples with one longer, more serious work--often a concerto with a
promising young local soloist--and ending with pop or novelty tunes arranged for orchestra.

Mr. Fiedler's style with all this music was technically secure, with tempos generally brisk and
rubato fairly rigid. It was direct, efficient, no-nonsense conducting, and it often served to purge
some of his more bathetic standards of their latent sentimentality.

Could Be Acerbic

What annoyed some more serious classical-music devotees--apart from Mr. Fiedler's personality,
which could be more acerbic and combative than the public image implied--was the implicit
didacticism of his method. Some people feel that to ease neophytes into classical music with
light classics amounts to a bastardization.

Mr. Fiedler's defenders would suggest that there are good popularizers and bad popularizers, and
that he was a good one. The directness of his style corresponded to the contemporary
interpretive fashions in classical music in general. And if his format was a formula, it was also a
sign that he knew his own limits and tastes very well.

In the Rafters for 30 Cents

Mr. Fiedler's proselytization had tangible results. For years, he led a summer pops series with
the San Francisco Symphony in the old Municipal Auditorium, and teen-agers could sit way up
in the cavernous rafters for 30 cents a ticket. Many of us were introduced to much of the
orchestral repertory in live performances that way, and it was not a bad introduction.

In his late years, Mr. Fiedler's programming began to look dated. The late-19th-century
warhorses at the center of his repertory fell out of fashion, and popular music moved into genres
that seemed increasingly resistant to orchestral arrangement. Still, his concerts continued to give
pleasure until the end. As much as anything else, Mr. Fiedler was a grand personality of the old
school, and it is a good measure of his accomplishment that the Boston Pops will surely find it
next to impossible to replace him.